Product Updates: July 26 - Aug 12

As our product teams continue their research, design, and development across our bigger product priorities, we've also tackled several smaller improvements and essential fixes for you!

Profitability Exports for Retainers

To make it even easier for you to manage the cost, revenue, and profitability of Retainer based work in Accelo, we've created a detailed export from the Retainer List, (and Period List) which will give you all the financial detail on services, expenses, and materials across your Retainers. Of course, this feature will be restricted to Admin users only.

Coming soon: we'll have a brand-new Insights area for each Retainer, so you can quickly see how profitable things are.

Clear the "End Date" if a user is reactivated

When a user account becomes inactive, we set a date on their account to denote their finish date, which ensures the profitability and utilization data in Accelo recognizes that they are no longer a staff resource. Previously, if someone's user account is re-activated, we were not clearing out this date, which could lead to confusion when viewing schedules and utilization reports! Our team has gone in and fixed this issue. 

Default Invoice Terms for Clients

Rather than have the Invoice Template always dictate the Due Date for each invoice, you can now set the terms on a client by client basis in the Preferences area of the Billing tab for each company/client.

E.g. in the example below, whenever this client is invoiced, the Due date will default to be 21 days after the invoice date. This setting will override the invoice template used.

Create Template while editing Quote Estimate

When editing a project plan, you've always been able to save the plan as a new project template, but if you were doing a similar thing in the quotes module, it wasn't possible until now. As you are building the quote plan/estimate, you can now easily save the line items and materials into a new project template (which can, of course, be used when creating a quote too).

Show Leave/Vacation in Utilization Dashboard 

If your team is booking a vacation or other leave time into Accelo's holiday calendar, their schedules and utilization will factor in those changes in availability. However, the Utilization Dashboard didn't give you the ability to visualize these "missing" hours. Now there's a Leave toggle in the legend area so you can get the full picture!

Retain activity body if switching between reply, reply-all

If you're replying to an email or note in Accelo and want to switch the reply to a reply-all, in some places the content of your reply was discarded. We've improved this and also ensured that other settings like activity class, tags, and privacy will be preserved too.

Remember values when switching between Booking options

When creating a booking, if you start on the Schedule tab to set-up your booking, and then realize you want to actually commit time, switching tabs would discard most of the details, which was not ideal. Now we'll preserve the staff/recipients and the date range for your booking if you toggle between the booking types.

Bulk Invoicing - Warn if Billing Contact has no email set

The Bulk Billing tool does a great job of finding all the un-billed client work and collating it into 1 (or multiple) invoices, and it can look at each project, retainer or ticket to figure out the appropriate billing contact. However, if this contact had no email set, we weren't provided a warning so it was possible to attempt to Create & Email each invoice. The warning has been implemented now.

Bugfix: Show Expense Type in Invoice PDF.

As part of our Expenses upgrade a little while back, we redesigned expense types. This caused a small problem in the PDF invoice where an expense line item was not appearing with its expense type title if you had that detail enabled in the PDF settings. It's all sorted now!

Default Priority for Ticket Types

This small improvement allows you to configure each type of Ticket (aka Issue) with a default priority setting which then appears as a ticket is being created. For example, all "Support" tickets may have a default priority of High, while all "Services" tickets have a default priority of Medium.

Xero: Sync Everything Quicker with Webhooks

For users of our Xero integration, the integration automatically syncs your invoices, purchases, contacts, and payments between the two systems. Historically, the time required to perform that sync could vary widely, from one minute to several hours in the right situation. As your accountant will tell you, it's critical to have accurate books, and this kind of delay could lead to a lot of confusion when data was slow to sync. To help eliminate these situations, we've upgraded our Xero integration to use Xero's webhooks systems. Webhooks is a system for immediately notifying and updating systems like Accelo's when updates happen. That means that when you're creating new invoices, receiving payments, etc. in Xero those updates should sync with Accelo almost immediately! This update is already in effect for all users of the Xero integration and requires no setting or configuration changes to begin using.

This is also an important building block in our upcoming work to introduce bi-directional syncing for the individual line items of your invoices and purchases. Stay tuned for more on this topic!

Google: Faster, More Reliable Email Sync

Speaking of improving the speed of integrations, we've just upgraded our Google integration to support their newest API. This upgraded connection allows Accelo to handle syncing even more data at a time than before and will improve the rate at which you're able to sync your email. This update is already in effect for all users of the individual Google and company-wide G Suite integrations and requires no setting or configuration changes to begin using.

Google: Bugfix: Updated Task Sync

When users of the individual Google and company-wide G Suite integrations sync their tasks with Google, those Tasks are stored under a special list of tasks entitled "Accelo Tasks." We recently found a problem where Google wouldn't actually tell us if that list were deleted, leading to situations where we would be unable to sync your tasks!  That's all fixed, and your tasks should once again sync normally.

Google, Exchange & Office 365: Cleaner, Simpler Meeting Descriptions

When you create a meeting in Accelo, that meeting automatically syncs with your integrated Google, Exchange or Office 365 calendar. This is a great way to schedule your meetings and time-sensitive work by ensuring that your schedule reflects the client, project, task, etc. which you're working on - making it easy for colleagues and managers to stay on top of the work that's being done. Previously, when you created the meeting in Accelo, a special line would be added to the meeting's description to identify the client, project, task, etc. which it was related to. While this information was helpful when you reviewed your own meetings, that information could be confusing to your clients, who don't have access to Accelo. We've now removed that extra line, so meetings, which are created through Accelo are now formatted and appear in your calendar the same as if they'd been created in that calendar.

QuickBooks: Sync Your Payments' Reference information

Ever had to track down a credit card payment, and had to figure out which of the hundreds of transactions you've created is the right one? To help simplify bookkeeping tasks like these, we've now expanded the QuickBooks integration to include your payment's reference information, pushing that information into QuickBooks when the payment is created in Accelo.  

If you're not using it already, the Reference field is a great way to keep track of all kinds of information regarding your payments - check numbers, credit card authorization numbers and more!